Global retailers must catch up with multi-channel consumers

There always seems to be more of a focus on global consumers’ online behaviour. Consumers have amazing options at their fingertips: information, services, and – not least – the ability to shop from anywhere via any number of personal technology devices.

The question for retailers over the next three-to-five years is how online shopping behaviour will continue to evolve. Retailers can collect some valuable information from their own customer data, but that doesn’t shed light on how millions of other shoppers are behaving.

The 2011 global multi-channel retail consumer survey was completed by 7,005 respondents from seven different countries. For PwC, this is our most comprehensive research to date on multi-channel retailing. In order to truly understand the trends and spot the patterns in multi-channel shopping, we surveyed only those consumers who self-identified as online shoppers.